* Perl 6 is a comprehensive redesign of Perl that aims to {greatly streamline and powerfully extend} the Perl 5.++ ecosystem.
** The many new built-in features of Perl 6 greatly advance the Perl tradition of programming language feature-and-paradigm hybrid vigor.
** See [The Long Perl 6 Super-Feature List] for the long overview.
* Perl 6 will support it's still-advancing Perl 5 big sister, and future versions of both languages will support increasing degrees of interoperability.
* Perl 6 is defined by the Perl 6 test suite (which are in turn based on the Perl 6 language design documents), not by conformance to a reference implementation (as Perl 5 was).
* While Perl 6 has been an infamously long time in development (see below), it has been relentlessly advancing along the long road to "industrial strength" in the last few years.
** New pre-1.0 releases of Perl 6 are now made on a routine monthly schedule.
** This long gestation period has allowed Perl 6 to make many important refinements on the basis of early implementations.
** The [Rakudo Star] release of Perl 6 on Parrot is due out in spring, 2010. This pre-1.0 release is intended to be practically usable by early Perl 6 developers.